Monthly Archives: June 2019

The Louis Couperus Museum is Located in The Hague, the Netherlands. The Couperus Museum is committed to promoting interest in the literary works of Louis Couperus in the Netherlands and across the globe. See also this soundless video that shows Louis Couperus at his 60th birthday celebration on June 9, 1923, in The Hague.

The Louis Couperus Museum is situated in a 19th-century house in The Hague and many of Couperus’s novel characters are from that city. In his younger years, Louis Couperus lived The Hague’s Nassauplein and this is where he wrote Eline Vere, his first novel.

Louis Couperus never actually lived at the address where the Museum is located (Javastraat 17) but it is where Albert Vogel (1924-1982) lived. Mr. Vogel was a Couperus impersonator who staged his “one-man literary shows’ and who also published a biography on Louis Couperus.

The Collection

The museum sits on the ground floor and the first room features objects and artifacts from Louis Couperus’s property and personal life. Here you can admire portraits of the writer and his relations and the desk at which he wrote his masterpieces. All of these artifacts belong to the “Letterkundig Museum” (the Dutch Literary Museum) and are here on loan.

Louis Couperus lived from 1863 to 1923 and he is among the most prominent Dutch novelists. Couperus became a celebrity not only in the Netherlands but also in several English speaking countries through his psychological works such as “The hidden force”, “Old people and the things that pass”, and “The books of the small souls”.

From his forties onwards, Louis Couperus became increasingly inspired by the literary and other cultural aspects of classical antiquity. Louis Couperus was a firm believer in reincarnation and he was convinced that he had lived in ancient Roma in an earlier life. One of his famous novels that relate to this is “The mountain of light” which describes the rise and fall of Elagabalus, the deified emperor, a book that became highly popular in Germany.